Believe in yourself and in your own voice, because there will be times in this business when you will be the only one who does. Take heart from the knowledge that an author with a strong voice will often have trouble at the start of his or her career because strong,distinctive voices sometimes make editors nervous. But in the end, only the strong survive.

Readers understand that the books celebrate female power. In the romance novel, the woman always wins. With courage, intelligence and gentleness she brings the most dangerous creature on the earth, the human male, to his knees.

I love threats. They make great quotes. Is that recorder working, Irene?

The concept of psychic energy is easy for most people to imagine. After all, it's just one step beyond intuition - and almost everyone is comfortable with the idea of intuition.

I read what I like to write: romantic suspense. I also love thrillers and novels of suspense, but I can't handle extreme violence and torture.

Romance novels are tales of brave women taming dangerous men. They are stories that capture the excitement of that most mysterious of relationships, the one between a woman and a man. They are legends told to women by other women, and they are as powerful and as endlessly fascinating to women as the legends that lie at the heart of all the other genres.

I didn't come in here to argue with a woman with big hair